The Decline of Traditonal Honor in the West, Ancient Greece to the Romantic Period

Over the centuries, for a variety of reasons we’ll explore today and next time, this traditional conception of external honor evolved into our modern idea of private, inner honor – a type of honor often used synonymously with “character” and “integrity.” Today, a man’s honor isn’t determined by a group of his peers, rather, it’s a very personal thing judged only by himself. Nineteenth century German statesman Otto von Bismarck captured this idea of private honor perfectly when he said in a speech

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Manly Honor: Part II — The Decline of

Traditonal Honor in the West, Ancient Greece to the Romantic Period

by Brett on October 16, 2012 · 54 comments

in A Man's Life, On Manhood

Welcome back to our series on manly honor In my last post, I explained the classic definition of

honor: having a reputation worthy of respect and admiration in a group of equal peers This

reputation consists of both horizontal honor (your acceptance as a full member of the group), and vertical honor (the praise you receive from excelling more than other members within the group)

This type of traditional, manly honor is a very public and external thing It requires a man to belong

to an honor group and suffer social consequences for not living up to the group’s code When primitive tribesmen, knights, and the Founding Fathers spoke of honor, this is the type of honor they meant

Over the centuries, for a variety of reasons we’ll explore today and next time, this traditional

conception of external honor evolved into our modern idea of private, inner honor – a type of

honor often used synonymously with “character” and “integrity.” Today, a man’s honor

isn’t determined by a group of his peers, rather, it’s a very personal thing judged only by himself Nineteenth century German statesman Otto von Bismarck captured this idea of private honor perfectly when he said in a speech:

“Gentlemen; my honor lies in no-one’s hand but my own, and it is not something that

others can lavish on me; my own honor, which I carry in my heart, suffices me

entirely, and no one is judge of it and able to decide whether I have it My honor

before God and men is my property, I give myself as much I believe that I have

deserved, and I renounce any extra.”

In today’s post, I’m going to begin an exploration of why this change from public to private honor

occurred The transformation was a long and complicated process, involving several political,

philosophical, and sociological changes in the West While I initially hoped to explain this history in a single post, the amount of dense, important information to cover really requires two In part one, I’ll cover how the seeds of honor’s dissolution began to be sown all the way back in Ancient Greece and continued through the Romantic Period Then in part two next week, we’ll see how those seeds came to full fruition during the modern era — beginning with the Victorian Era and leading up

to today

A Brief Road Map on Where These Avenues Are Leading

Before we set out on this romp through the history of honor, I think it might be beneficial to give a short primer on how all of the factors that will be discussed tie together

There are two main factors that weakened the traditional idea of honor First, over time honor became based not on courage and strength, but on moral virtues Honor could have continued in this state – your public reputation could have been based on your honor group’s judgment of whether you were living a moral life (this state of honor was last seen during the time of the

Victorian gentleman, which we’ll discuss next time.) But in the evolution of honor, it did not just

become premised on moral virtues, it also became completely private – every man could create his

own, personal honor code, and only he himself could judge whether or not he was living up to it This dissolved any sense of a shared honor code (“to each their own!”), which meant shame also disappeared – there were no longer any consequences for flaunting the code of honor

As just mentioned, in this post and the next, we will get into the political, sociological, and

philosophical changes that fueled these two factors While it may be tempting to read these posts

as saying that these cultural forces are bad, and that personal honor is bad, my goal is rather to simply delineate as objectively as possible why the traditional ideal of honor disappeared and was

supplanted entirely with private honor, and then, to argue that private and public honor need not

be mutually exclusive, and can, and should coexist.

From Public to Private Honor: Ancient Greece to the Renaissance Ancient Greece

While it’s easy to assume that

the decline of public honor and

the rise of private honor is only

a recent phenomenon, the

seeds of honor’s

transformation from a public

to private concept were

actually sewn at the beginning

of Western civilization

In societies without formal

legal systems, honor serves as

a rough enforcer of justice

Thus, democracy and the rule

of law, two important

developments to come out of

ancient Greece, are in some

ways contrary to traditional honor and made it less vital to the functioning of a community

This early conflict between traditional honor and democratic ideals was actually the principle

theme in a trilogy of Greek tragedies written by Aeschylus The Orestia recounts the curse that

befalls the family of King Agamemnon after he returns home from the Trojan War A series

of inter-familial murders, all in the name of avenging and defending the honor of one slain family member after another, comes to an end when the goddess Athena establishes a jury trial to try Orestes for the murder of his mother Personal and familial honor is replaced by obedience to democratic law as the governing force in Greek society This isn’t to say that honor and revenge killings stopped occurring after the establishment of democratic juries, but they did begin to be more frowned upon

Playwrights weren’t the only ones questioning traditional, public honor The philosophers Socrates and Aristotle raised concerns about the ideal in some of their teachings For Socrates, it was

better for the collective that he subject himself to the rule of unjust state laws than to maintain his honor, or reputation, among his friends by escaping his execution According to Socrates, concern for reputation was something only for thoughtless men What mattered to the great philosopher wasn’t the opinion of others (the basis of traditional honor), but rather knowing he lived according

to what he thought was just Put another way, Socrates chose integrity to his personal ideal over

the public honor of his followers.

Aristotle showed a similar disinterest in the opinion of others While he spoke of honor as an

external good in his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle was uncomfortable with the idea that it be

based solely on the opinion of others Rather, Aristotle made a tentative argument that honor be based on attaining personal virtue Excellence meant fulfilling your potential Instead of being loyal

to a group’s code of honor, it was more virtuous to be loyal to virtue itself

Early Christianity

Three aspects of the rise and spread

of Christian philosophy would have a

huge impact in weakening honor as a

cultural force in the West: 1) its

inclusiveness and universality; 2) its

emphasis on inner intent rather than

outward appearances; and 3) its

pacifism

Inclusiveness and universality.

Traditional honor is exclusive Not

everyone is welcome to the club and

the code of honor doesn’t apply to

everybody – just members Christ and

his disciples taught a doctrine that was

just the opposite: inclusive and

universal Open to any who believed

This idea of inclusiveness and

universality was summed up nicely in

Paul’s epistle to the Galatians when he

said, “There is neither Jew nor Greek,

there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Inner intent over outward appearances Traditional honor is based on your public reputation.

Christianity teaches that what the world thinks of you is not as important as what God thinks of you Moreover, it emphasizes the importance of private intent and faith For example, it’s not enough that you don’t have actual, physical sex with another man’s wife, you can’t

even think about it Because the chamber of a man’s mind and heart can only be seen by him, only

the individual (and his God) can judge whether his intent and faith are adequate

Pacifism While countless wars have been fought “with the cross of Jesus going on before,”

Christianity has also inspired many of its believers to devoted pacifism Christ’s radical teaching to

“turn the other cheek” and to “bless those that curse you” turned honor on its head; a Christian

could find ample support in his scriptures that it was more honorable not to retaliate when insulted

or attacked than to strike back The example of Christ submitting willfully on the cross would inspire countless Christian martyrs to lay down their lives rather than fight back physically

Medieval Europe

As Christianity spread and became the

state religion for kingdoms and

empires, the competing demands of

traditional honor culture and faith

created a moral and

philosophical quandary Traditional

honor still had a primal hold on men,

but elements of their new religion

seemed to run completely counter to it

To bridge this seemingly

insurmountable divide, Christian rulers

during the Middle Ages “Christianized”

traditional honor by developing the

aristocratic Code of Chivalry Chivalry

wedded together primitive honor’s

emphasis on public reputation, but

added new moral virtues to the code

that had to be kept to maintain that

reputation, and thus keep the honor of

one’s peers

Traditional honor found a place among

a pacifist Christian religion by

marshaling honor’s historic emphasis

on the qualities of strength and

courage towards the defense of the

“least of these” in Christ’s kingdom

Knights swore oaths to protect the weak and defenseless, particularly women Honesty, purity, generosity, and mercifulness — virtues taught by the Gospels — were part of the knightly code In keeping with Christ’s admonition to lay up your treasure in heaven and not in the world, some groups, like the Templars, even required their members to take a vow of poverty

Beyond these small

adaptations, medieval Christian chivalry was

still primarily a traditional code of honor.

Knights vowed to defend their own honor and

the honor of their fellow knights If his honor,

or reputation, was besmirched by an equal, a

knight had a duty to retaliate For the

medieval knight, might still made right A knight

could indeed be lacking in virtue, but as long

as he could defeat the man who brought to

light his moral defect in “single combat,”

he remained a man of honor The story of Sir

Lancelot’s adulterous relationship with King

Arthur’s wife, Guinevere, illustrates this; when

the other knights discovered his sin, Lancelot

insisted that his indiscretion didn’t exist

because he was able to fight and best his

accusers

The Renaissance

Beginning in the 14th century in

Italy, the Renaissance was a

period of huge advances in art,

science, and philosophy

Alongside these cultural

evolutions, there was a

transformation in the

Western psyche that would

eventually greatly weaken the

classic concept of honor: the

development of the idea of

sincerity.

Sincerity demands that a person

speak and act in accordance with his inner thoughts, feelings, and desires It’s such a commonly lauded trait today (and has now morphed into an emphasis on “authenticity”), that it’s easy to think the concept has been around forever But prior to the 17th century, people didn’t focus on having an inner life as we understand it today – in which you atomize and analyze all your feelings, emotions, and motivations So as Renaissance men began to plumb the contents of their minds and hearts, they ran into a new contradiction between this inner life and traditional honor — which often requires an individual to place loyalty to the group first, and to speak and act in a way that contradicts his personal thoughts, feelings, and desires Because traditional honor depends on the

opinion of others, it doesn’t care if you feel like a hypocrite when following the code So long as

your outward appearances conform to the honor group’s code of honor, you maintain your honor For this reason, Renaissance writers and thinkers began to question this aspect of honor and advocate for sincerity as the true ideal Shakespeare was a harsh critic of traditional honor and a strong proponent for sincerity in his plays In many of his works, the characters choose being true

to oneself rather than submitting to their tribe’s code of honor See Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet.

The new societal demands for sincerity during the Renaissance began a rapid shift in how

societies perceived honor An honor based solely on public reputation didn’t seem all that

desirable It wasn’t enough that you acted truthful and others thought of you as honest, to be honorable, you actually had to be truthful to the core of your being.

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment’s focus on tolerance and egalitarianism further diminished traditional honor – which at its core is inherently intolerant and anti-egalitarian If you live up to the group’s honor code, you’re given rights and privileges; if you don’t, you’re shamed and seen as inferior You don’t gain respect and praise simply by existing – your honor must be earned by your keeping, and

excelling, of the group’s code But Enlightenment thinkers began to forward the idea that all

people had certain inalienable rights that they were born with and which could not be taken away They also revitalized the ancient Greek ideal of democracy as a superior form of justice to the rewards and punishments meted out by the eye-for-an-eye concept of honor

The Romantic Period

While Enlightenment philosophy eroded

the concept of traditional, public honor,

another group of 18th and 19th century

thinkers, the Romantics, took up the

baton of sincerity passed from

the Renaissance and advocated for a

new type of honor that was based on

personal integrity The Romantics, led by

French writer and philosopher

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, believed that the

individual and his desires should come

before the group’s needs Rousseau

argued that honor based on the opinion

of others (amour propre) was inferior to

an honor based on what the individual

thought of himself (amour de soi) For

Rousseau and the Romantics,

honor should be individual, internal, and

private; not social, external, and public

To justify this new definition of honor,

Rousseau and his fellow Romantics

fashioned a theory of human development that sentimentalized solitude Before man formed tribes and groups, he lived independently in a state of nature, concerned only for his own

happiness and well-being It wasn’t until the Fall of Adam and Eve that man gathered in tribes and began to be concerned about what other fellows thought of him This theory, of course, has been proven false by anthropologists Mankind, like their primate cousins, have always been social

animals and have always been concerned about their place in the group

Despite being wrong about the history of human development, Rousseau and the Romantics created a legacy that lionized the importance of the individual, a drumbeat which intensified many times over in the 20th century, and would ultimately be one of the biggest nails in the coffin of traditional honor

Despite the challenges created by the Enlightenment and Romanticism, traditional honor still had a strong hold on Western society in the 18th and 19th centuries Aristocratic gentleman continued

to challenge each other to duels when they felt their honor, or reputation, had been impugned, even though the practice was illegal in most Western countries by then Young soldiers, who had grown up reading epic poems and tales of battlefield glory, went to war hoping to capture that sense of honor that Homer and others wrote of It would take the trenches of WWI to cool these deep reserves of martial fervor

Conclusion, or Is Honor Making You Feel Kinda Uncomfortable Right Now?

As we can see, the transformation of honor from a public to private concept isn’t a

recent phenomenon The groundwork was actually laid at the beginnings of Western civilization Ideals such as the rule of law, democracy, personal sincerity, egalitarianism and individualism

fostered an environment antithetical to traditional honor However, it wouldn’t be until the 20th century that honor would complete its transformation from meaning “having a public reputation worthy of respect and admiration” to simply meaning “being true to one’s personal ideals.”

As I said in the first post in this series, many people give a lot of lip service to honor, but don’t really know what it means, at least historically Once they do learn more about it, they may begin

to feel like it’s not such a good thing after all Certainly, many of the seeds of the dissolution of honor, talked about here and next time, have become unquestioned Truths in our modern culture, and probably resonated more with you as you read than the idea of honor itself! But if you’ll stick with me, after this history, I’ll come back to explain that while personal, individual honor is a

laudatory value, classic honor can also be a powerful and positive moral force as well.

_

Sources:

Honor by Frank Henderson Stewart

What Is Honor: A Question of Moral Imperatives by Alexander Welsh

Honor: A History by James Bowman

Tagged as: honor

Related Posts

1 Manly Honor: Part III — The Victorian Era and the Development of the Stoic-Christian Code of Honor

2 Manly Honor: Part I — What Is Honor?

3 The Basics of Art: The Romantic Period

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